it the one about the lake? And the jinn. And the princess. Please?” She arched her back. I threw off the sheets.
“You already know it.”
“I work with facts. I forget the fairy tales.”
So I told her again.
As soon as we finished, we heard the knock. Farhana’s colleague, Wes, and an old friend of mine from Karachi, Irfan. They were staying in the adjoining cabin. We were meant to meet at the restaurant for breakfast before leaving for the lake, but here they were now, as Farhana predicted, because no one felt like trudging a quarter mile for eggs. So we dressed in a hurry, welcomed them inside, and ordered in.
The omelettes were cold by the time the waiter arrived, but still crisp around the edges, the interior plump with finely minced tomatoes and green chilies. Irfan and the waiter talked at length in Kashmiri. Or was it Hindko? I could identify only a few sounds—akh, gari gari—focusing more on Irfan’s expression. The news wasn’t good.
Wes and Farhana discussed glaciers. They might as well have spoken Gujri. I chewed my omelette in silence. Red, yellow, and green. The colors made a familiar flag, though I couldn’t remember which. Afghanistan’s had the red and green, though its eggs weren’t yellow but black. And I wasn’t even sure what flag it flew these days; after the American invasion, Taliban white had been dyed to something like the flag that had flown under the monarchy. Senegal; Sri Lanka. Yes, they flew these three colors. On the plate before me, I replaced the lion of Sri Lanka with the owl of last night. I decided to tell everyone.
Irfan said the sighting was an ill omen (though I still couldn’t help thinking I was the one being sighted). Irfan was the reason our route had changed, which was the reason Farhana and I had argued yesterday, at a shop that sold shawls. My hurt at the way she rejected the one I’d draped around her shoulders, and her anger—“We didn’t need to come to Kaghan at all”—was all of it still raw? I looked at her now, afraid of losing the peace of waking up together this morning. Was it already beginning to fade? But she remained cheerful— no lip-picking today!—saying that in some places, owls were believed to be holy spirits of shamans, and when I said, “As holy as ours?” she tossed me a winsome look and Irfan shifted disapprovingly. Perhaps he’d heard us last night. Or this morning.
Wes glowed as if he were the one we’d all stayed up listening to. “Take any pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see.” He chewed with his mouth open.
“They didn’t come out.”
“What do you mean they didn’t come out?” His smile was an oval of eggy goo.
“Just that.”
“With a digital? You’re literally in the wrong business.”
Farhana laughed. “Don’t tease him. That’s a touchy topic.”
What if I revealed all her touchy topics?
“We should leave.” I stood up. “The lake is crowded by noon.”
Irfan returned to his cabin for his jacket. Farhana picked hot peppers out of a second omelette for Wes. She called him “Wesley” and he called her “Farrah.” She called him “wimpy” and he called her “hella sweet.”
As I packed my bag with my camera and lens, I resisted the urge to glance again at Farhana. I suppressed a longing to sweep everyone away—like a buffalo clearing its back with a tail!—so we could start again, just us. But what I could not resist—though I knew it would ignite that prickle resting so close to the skin, I knew I would regret it before I could even begin—was replaying the past week in my head.
The Roads to Kaghan
Before Kaghan there was Karachi, and that is where the plan had changed. Karachi. To my disgust, this time I had taken photographs of beggars and children running naked in the street, sucking mango pits and smearing their sooty cheeks with orange stains. “For rich men with retirement homes in Napa Valley,” I said to no one in particular, hitting delete.
We stayed five days. The talk was mostly of disappearances, young men picked up on the streets of Karachi and Peshawar. Every time a plane flew over us, Irfan said it was one of the unmarked ones, the CIA condemning some dead soul to hell.
Many times in those days I thought of my interview with the man who said I was lucky to come from a place always in the news. If he only knew how rapidly the glamour of chaos recedes the closer you come to it. If he only knew never to slit its belly. It is already slit, and the insides are always raw, and people in Karachi spent a lot of time looking around, trying not to slip in a city damaged not by one but a series of attacks, each more malevolent, more multipronged. On any given day, the target would be a mosque and a hotel; on another, a bus and a train. The next, Chinese officials in Balochistan and Pakistani generals in Punjab. Soon, it was just about everything except the two everyone resented most, the army on the ground and the drones in the air, because you can’t kill a drone, it’s a drone. And you can’t kill an army, it’s an army.
I watched my parents age. Sickness, fear. The multi-pronged pincers feeding on the anguish of growing old in a land consumed equally by terror as by trivia. Getting the phone fixed, the toilet fixed, the air conditioner fixed, the cable fixed, the road fixed. A day lost begging for electricity, the alms lost in an hour. Where was the space for higher aspirations, for revolution?
And yet, despite the monotony of dread, something lived. Resilience can flower in the muck of death and despair, particularly when it doesn’t even know it. I saw this especially around my sister. Hers was an elasticity I didn’t think Farhana expected to see and I wasn’t sure she was glad to see it. It made her feel… irrelevant.
I compared them, my sister Sonia and Farhana. I knew Farhana did too. Had she expected to come from a position of—improvement? She was better educated. Wealthier. Sonia taught at a private school that paid 15,000 rupees per month. Farhana made more than two hundred times as much. When they shopped together, Sonia bargained for her as though for herself, and bought her gifts. Farhana never reciprocated. She would have been right in identifying herself in the position of receiver in a culture that took pride in its hospitality. But she didn’t really reveal any desire to give. Wes, on the other hand, frequently presented my mother with flowers and fruit, and I’ll admit I was surprised, surprised also that we were comparing at all, Farhana and I. Sonia to Farhana, Farhana to Wes. Why?
It didn’t stop. We kept matching them up. Sonia hadn’t enjoyed much freedom or affection from my father; Farhana received much from hers. And yet. Sonia had a comfortable, casual air about her that came from complete ease in an environment she claimed to envy me for leaving. Farhana was seldom as relaxed, not in San Francisco, certainly not here. Sonia laughed more than Farhana. She flirted with shopkeepers. She had a cabal of “best friends.” Her cell phone never stopped ringing. Her benign husband observed everything about her with a benign gaze, no matter how she was dressed. But dress did matter to Farhana.
She’d come equipped with two outfits, both once belonged to her mother, both with kurtas falling halfway down her shins, both in colors unbecoming. She was too pale for parrot green and mouse brown made her look, well, mousy. Besides, the starched cotton flared around her torso. She complained of looking pregnant, which she did, though I said the best lay underneath. She asked why I hadn’t told her about the latest fashions. I asked why she hadn’t searched the internet. To which she replied, tetchily, “I didn’t know your sister was so fashionable.” To which I didn’t know
